Hands on: five podcast apps that improve on iOS functionality

The iPhone and other iOS devices let you listen to podcasts out of the box, …

When I first heard about podcasting, I didn't get it. Why would I want to download MP3 files of people talking? But then former Apple CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated the usefulness of podcasts when he introduced podcast support for iTunes and the iPod at WWDC 2005, and I was sold. (Watch the video if you're unfamiliar with podcasting.)

I now listen to podcasts when walking to and from work, cooking, doing the dishes, etc. This lets me keep up with developments in philosophy, economics, science, and technology, not to mention entertainment with things like the stories from flight attendant Betty and relationship advice from Dan Savage. Podcasting combines two somewhat revolutionary elements: podcasts can be produced by anyone, and you can listen to them on the go without taking away time from other activities.

Within the Apple universe, the original model for listening to podcasts (or watching them) was to download them with iTunes on the computer, sync them to an iPod, and then listen on the go. This is fine on (non-touch) iPods, but iPhones and other iOS devices are more capable and no longer need to be tethered to a computer in order to download new podcast episodes.

Unfortunately, this feature is also riddled with limitations. First of all, it only works for podcasts that are listed on Apple's podcast directory. Second, there's a delay of up to two hours before new episodes become available. Last but not least, you have to manually check for new episodes and download them individually.

As such, an opportunity for third party developers was born. We looked at four "podcatcher" applications for iOS. We also examined Stitcher Smart Radio, which promises to let you listen to content "without syncing or downloading," for those of us who can't be bothered with such mundanities.

Common ground

Podcaster, iCatcher, Pocket Casts, and Instacast, which all cost $2 in the App Store, all present you with a podcast directory where you can search for podcasts and then subscribe (for free!) to the feed. You can peruse individual episodes from your subscribed feeds and then download the the ones you'd like to listen to or watch later, or begin to stream them immediately. They'll all show you show notes embedded in the podcast feed and let you visit links, if any. During playback, you can use a scrubber to jump to a different point in the program or skip back or forth by a certain number of seconds. When you go do something else, your playback position is remembered when you return, and it's possible to speed up playback for audio podcasts. Of course Apple's built-in functionality also lets you do all of this with various degrees of ease (except for visiting show note links), but each of these four apps add some additional functionality.

All four podcatchers, as well as iTunes, support import and export of an OPML files, which is basically just a list of podcast subscriptions. This makes it easy to move from one podcast application to another.

Podcaster

Although the program was initially rejected by Apple for "duplicating built-in functionality," Podcaster's developer kept at it until the app was accepted into the App Store. And Podcaster has come a long way since we reviewed it back in 2009. A nice touch is that its podcast directory is browsable by provider, which is very handy if you are a fan of podcasters extraordinaire Dan Benjamin or Leo Laporte, or you want to see what NASA, NPR, or HowStuffWorks are up to.

The main interface is nice and clean: a list of podcasts with a link to downloaded episodes at the top, although for some strange reason, not all downloaded episodes would show up there. At the bottom of the main screen are buttons to refresh the feeds and change settings, as well as one to go to the download screen. One little feature that I like is that there's a button on the playback screen that lets you toggle between playing one podcast after another, and stopping after the currently playing episode has finished. The fact that Apple insists on playing all episodes in a podcast one after the other has made me spend countless hours creating iTunes smart playlists to avoid this behavior. I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it does.

Podcaster allows you to receive notifications when there are new episodes for up to ten podcasts. However, notifications often fail to appear, or sometimes they come in long after a new episode is released.

iCatcher

Unlike the others, iCatcher is a universal iPhone/iPod touch/iPad app, but I only tried it on the iPhone. iCatcher lets you add podcast feeds using a searchable podcast directory, by URL, or by browsing the Web. But when I used the latter method and navigated to an RSS feed, the screen dimmed and the application froze. I had to terminate it in the application switcher and relaunch to get it back to working order.

The main thing that iCatcher has going for it is tons and tons of options, which include the ability to change the podcast artwork and name (Pocket Casts also supports this). You can import and export media through the dreaded iTunes USB file sharing mechanism, though this requires some cumbersome additional steps. iCatcher also lets you download individual episodes without subscribing to a feed.

The user interface is fair, but not great; the many options clutter up several of the screens. There is one exception: the playback screen. This screen is very well done. It shrinks the podcast's artwork a little, so everything fits well. By tapping the top right corner of the screen, you get to see the episode description that is included in the feed.

By default, the iPhone's built-in back/forward controls, such as the buttons on the lock screen or the double/triple click with the headphone clicker button, initiate a 30-second skip rather than going to the previous/next episode. Pocket Casts and Instacast also do this, which is very useful.

Pocket Casts

Pocket Casts, or just "Casts" on the iPhone, is much simpler to use than iCatcher, but it still has some great features. I was very impressed with the podcast list screen, which doesn't show a list with names, but rather shows a grid of images. There is no "edit" button, but tapping and holding allows you to delete a podcast feed or change its settings.

Pocket Casts makes it easy to switch between three screens: the podcasts/episodes screen, the playback screen, the podcast directory search, and the settings. This makes the application easy to use, but unfortunately, with those options at the bottom and playback controls with a volume slider above it, the playback screen gets rather crowded and the top of the embedded artwork is cut off. Even though the interface is much cleaner than iCatcher's overall, the roles are reversed when it comes to the playback screen.

Like iCatcher, Pocket Casts changes the standard controls so that it jumps a certain number of seconds back or forward. One benefit, however, is that Pocket Casts lets you specify exactly how many seconds the jumps are. The 45 seconds forward and 10 seconds back seem a reasonable default, letting you (for instance) skip a song with only a few button presses and then skip back in smaller steps if you went too far.

Pocket Casts lets you set notifications for individual podcasts, which arrive with sufficient promptness. The reason for this is probably that Pocket Casts doesn't directly manage the podcast feeds on the iPhone, but rather goes through a set of servers that keep an eye on when new episodes appear. This makes checking for new episodes much faster and uses much less data traffic, but the downside is that unlike the other podcatchers, Pocket Casts won't let you subscribe to a podcast feed hosted within your private network.

Instacast

Like the rest of the Instacast interface, the playback screen is clean to the point of minimalism. In the episode overview, three buttons let you toggle between starred, all, and downloaded episodes. This is useful, but one option is sorely missed: the one that lets you see only unplayed episodes. You can mark all episodes as played (even if they haven't been downloaded), but what's the point if you still have to look at them? To be fair, none of the other podcatchers handle large feeds where you only want to download a subset of the episodes particularly well. At least Instacast lets you order the episodes from oldest to newest.

The playback screen doesn't have previous/next track buttons, and like iCatcher and Pocket Casts, the iPhone's back/forward controls are now used to skip back or forward a certain number of seconds. The number of seconds can be selected separately for back and forward. Although all the other podcatchers also support enhanced podcasts, Instacast is the only one that will open links contained in them. However, Instacast is the only one of the four podcatcher apps that doesn't have some sort of playlist support. Instacast and iCatcher can use iCloud to sync playback positions, but I didn't test this.

Stitcher Smart Radio

Stitcher has been carpet bombing the podosphere with ads lately, and it's a very different beast. The app doesn't let you subscribe to podcast feeds or download episodes. Instead, Stitcher lets you discover content and then start listening to it. You can set up your own "radio stations" easily, and there's a whole lot of liking/disliking going on. If you're like me and only like a carefully curated list of podcast feeds with episodes ordered from oldest to newest to be listened to chronologically, Stitcher is not for you. But it's great for finding new content, using a search algorithm that allows for lots of serendipity. (For example, it finds lots of stuff not even remotely related to your search term.)

Of course, Stitcher also finds popular podcasts just fine. (Although I missed the world's smartest human being Cecil Adams fighting ignorance since 1973, "it's taking longer than we thought.") The thing that unexperienced podcast listeners will like is that it finds individual episodes rather than feeds. If you type "hypercritical," for example, you'll see the latest episode of our own John Siracusa's podcast named "hypercritical", which you can immediately start listening to as it downloads in the background.

If Stitcher sounds interesting, give it a try, as it's free. However, they do ask you to register or login using Facebook before you can use the app. If you already have podcasts in iTunes, Stitcher creates a "Favorites Station" based on (some of) those when it first starts. Keep in mind that Stitcher's intelligence resides in the cloud and the app doesn't actually keep any downloaded content. So, you can't start playing anything unless you have connectivity, and Stitcher can easily use up a lot of 3G data traffic if you use it on the go—if you listen to one episode over multiple sessions, that episode gets downloaded several times. This is unlike the other four apps, which run fine in airplane mode (although Podcaster throws up that annoying "turn off airplane mode or use WiFi" requester).

Conclusions

As a podcast addict, I'm excited to see so many good ideas in this area. Unfortunately, those ideas are spread over many different applications, which are all still a bit rough around the edges. Still, I have no trouble saying it's worth spending a couple of bucks on any of these four apps for anyone who is more than the most casual of podcast listeners—and those people should probably just use Stitcher. But Pocket Casts and Instacast seem to be the strongest contenders at this time. However, the ability to manage large number of episodes on the computer is also compelling, so I'm not banishing iTunes from my podcasting life just yet either.

Now, go take advantage of this wonderful technology that previous generations had to live without. If you have any additional questions about any of the apps, let me know in the comments.

Iljitsch van Beijnum
Iljitsch is a contributing writer at Ars Technica, where he contributes articles about network protocols as well as Apple topics. He is currently finishing his Ph.D work at the telematics department at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) in Spain. Emaililjitsch.vanbeijnum@arstechnica.com//Twitter@iljitsch

The Instacast skip feature works great. I have forward set for a minute, and back for 20 seconds. So I can skip commercials on certain podcasts. And it works much better than doing WiFi sync with iTunes make sure I walk out in the morning with a sync'd podcast list. Saves time and battery.

I switched to Downcast with the release of iOS 5. The iPad version of "Music" (the artist formerly known as "iPod") demoted the importance of the spoken word to the point at which the Apple app was no longer useful to me. Although "Music" is still functional for podcasts on the iPhone, Downcast is far superior. That's my choice for both devices.

My first reaction to "Music" was that Apple now wants to pimp the content that their store charges money for: (music on the iPhone/iPad,iPod Touch) and video for Apple TV. They have every right to do so, but I prefer to have a great podcast app for my iPhone/iPad and I use Plex/Mac mini for video.

Another vote for Downcast. I've been using it for a few months to listen to 5by5 podcasts like The Talk Show and Hypercritical. It's been solid - no glitches. The interface is clean and professional. There are multiple skip options: <-30, <-15, 30-> and 2m->. There are lots and lots of options but I've been happy with the "out of the box" experience.

I dropped syncing with iTunes every since the travesty of the iOS 5 'Music' app. Look through iTunes, and there is only one category for podcasts, both audio and video. But with iOS 5, those podcasts are split into either the Video app or the Music app, depending on their medium. Ridiculous!

I switched to Pocket Casts - incredibly flexible, and it maintains the playback controls for the video podcasts which the Video app no longer supports (portrait orientation playback, rewind and skip forward, automatically switching to audio only version when dropping out of the app). The developer is extremely responsive as well - I had a podcast that only looked back one episode on the server, but I kept missing the shows. So I asked the developer if there was a way to set the cached number of shows to something a little higher, and he did it right away. Suddenly, I could see a couple of weeks worth of shows available - something even iTunes wouldn't do.

I've been loving Instacast for a while now, so there may be some Stockholm syndrome, but:

If you look at "All Episodes," which covers all your podcasts in one list, it will display only unplayed podcasts, which has been pretty much exactly when I want to see them.

Also, most of the podcasting programs do this, but a great thing about Instacast is that you can cache an episode greater than 20 MB over a cellular data connection, because it just caches it as a stream, but it's transparent to you; it's just downloading.

Why is Downcast always ignored on lists like these? One of the things that make Downcast great is you can set custom rules for every podcast. You can decide how many episodes to keep, which episodes to download, and how often you check on a global or per-podcast basis. It has very fine tuned playback controls that allow for exactly the right speed (from .5x speed all the way to 3x, with .25x intervals between them). A recent update gave it iCloud support, so now you can synchronize podcasts from one device to another. I can start a podcast on my iPhone, come home, and listen to the rest on my iPad, for example. It keeps track of which shows you've downloaded on each device, so you'll always have that show available no matter what device you use. Oh, and it has gesture controls, which make it easy to swipe forward or backwards through an episode, or double-tap the album art to play/pause.

The interface of Downcast is nicer and the capabilities are vastly more powerful than Instacast in my opinion, and the developer is very responsive on Twitter, constantly adding new features. It's my most used application besides Google Voice for the iPhone.

I've got Pocket Casts and Downcast installed at the moment and I like the speed of PocketCasts, but the features of Downcast. In particular:- multiple playlists by feed (I use this to sort by subject)- a sleep timer for when you're listening in bed and don't want it to play all night- swipes to go forward and back (pocketcast can jump around sometimes when my iPod's bouncing in my pocket)

I just wish Downcast was faster to startup, faster to check for new content, and faster overall. It's fine at first, but if you accumulate a lot of content, the whole thing bogs down. Pocketcasts definitely the fastest one I've tried.

I've tried Instacast a few times at the behest of friends and could never gel with the interface for some reason.

Another +1 for Downcast. I tried a couple of the others before switching, glad to see it's recognised on here. Weird how the best fail to get on the list. I wonder how many other apps I've missed this way.

iCatcher works great for me. It has all the features anyone has listed for Downcast or Insta Cast, plus more. The UI is complex enough that I wouldn't recommend it for a casual listener, but for me it's awesome. I have a Favorites playlist that has the podcasts I want to listen to as soon as they come out, and then another list for when driving with my wife, and yet another for when I'm bored and none of my favorites are current. I have yet another for music discovery.

Each podcast can be assigned a priority, and then I can order the playlists by priority, age or manually. I can also set the number to keep for each podcast, so my playlists are ordered by my interest.

Why? Last time I used it their playlist implementation was laughable. No custom playlist, just a so called crappy "smart playlist". They probably just thought "Ah right! Playlist! Uhm...yeah this 1 min coding will do fine." iCatcher is much better in every way than Downcast.Even searching for podcast is better with iCatcher with it's filters.

Seriously, Downcast is another app to check out. Personally I think it's far better than the apps listed here. Clearly the iPhone/iPad/iPod lacks this functionality so probably any app here is an improvement but Downcast is the best.

Although the recommendations are light on what makes Downcast so much better than the competition, I want to know what the fuss is about, so I'm going to download it and I'll post my impressions here on this thread tomorrow.

The selection for these five apps was based on recommendations here on the forums, and I still had Podcaster from way back when and I was curious about Stitcher with the "no downloading or syncing" thing. Then I saw there are some more podcasting apps but I didn't want the story to get too long or too complex or too shallow by covering more podcast applications.

Here is another +1 for Downcast. I switched from Podcaster a few months ago and couldn't be happier. It is super stable. My favorite feature is custom settings per podcast. Podcaster forced global settings for episode to keep for all podcasts. The developer is super responsive to suggestions as well. How did Downcast get left out of this article???!!!

Although the recommendations are light on what makes Downcast so much better than the competition, I want to know what the fuss is about, so I'm going to download it and I'll post my impressions here on this thread tomorrow.

The selection for these five apps was based on recommendations here on the forums, and I still had Podcaster from way back when and I was curious about Stitcher with the "no downloading or syncing" thing. Then I saw there are some more podcasting apps but I didn't want the story to get too long or too complex or too shallow by covering more podcast applications.

Downcast just feels the most complete to me. I look forward to your review.

Another vote for Downcast. I readily admit I've not tried the others but, since downloading it and finding it did everything I wanted, I haven't felt the need to. Gesture control on its own is worth the cost of the app for me, plus it's universal and looks & functions beautifully on both iPhone and iPad.

I prefer the UI on Pocket Casts over that of Instacast, but one thing that needs to be mentioned is that Pocket Casts's UI is slower/less responsive, especially while downloading. I think the app uses a web view instead of a native UI. But this may only be a problem on older devices, like my 2nd-gen iPod touch.

But with iOS 5, those podcasts are split into either the Video app or the Music app, depending on their medium. Ridiculous!

Why do you think that's bad?I don't know about you, but watching video podcasts and listening to audio podcasts are very different things for me. Audio podcasts (like music) are for when my hands (and eyes) are busy. Video podcasts (like TV) are for when I'm idle.

Can any of these apps sync progress with iTunes? (maybe through a Mac helper app)

I dropped syncing with iTunes every since the travesty of the iOS 5 'Music' app. Look through iTunes, and there is only one category for podcasts, both audio and video. But with iOS 5, those podcasts are split into either the Video app or the Music app, depending on their medium. Ridiculous!

I agree about the schism of the iPhone's iPod app (though that really started with the iPod touch, probably in iOS 3.x days), but the audio/video division does make a kind of sense for podcast playback:

When I listen to audio podcasts I tend to be walking or doing something with my hands and eyes. When I watch a video podcasts, I'll be seated and able to see the screen.

So the logic kinda works for me: audio for ears when eyes occupied, video when eyes available.

What REALLY bugs me about video podcasts though, is that the majority of them don't need to be video.

The Gillmor Gang is a case in point: just talking heads, with no option of an audio only feed. Often around 950MB, it's huge megabyte download for something that could be done in 50MB.

And no offence to the principals, but they're hardly the most photogenic of subjects to look at (the Skype distorted webcams would make even a model look unappealing).

The app-formerly-known-as-iPod can at least play these as audio with a trick: start playback, turn the phone off, then press the headphone remote to start playing again - the screen will stay off. You do need headphones with that control though and it doesn't change the gargantuan media sizes.

I intensely dislike this trend to treat podcasts as TV. It's as if the intended audience cannot cope without a visual.

I "hear" the former This is my next / Vergecast is going to same route - they often reference what they're doing on camera. At least an audio only feed is still available for now.

Although the recommendations are light on what makes Downcast so much better than the competition, I want to know what the fuss is about...

Sorry, I'll be more specific.

* I was motivated by the lameness of the "Music" app, so my search was deliberately limited to apps that are enhanced for the iPad. I could see that there are some strong apps that were small-screen only, but the immediate need was to get an acceptable podcast player for iPad. Downcast is way more than "acceptable".

* It has the two-level hierarchical main view that I was looking for and good options for customizing the functionality by podcast, as others have covered.

* It passed two good tests that "Music" failed big-time:

-- Adam at the MacCast is kind enough to code chapter stops in his podcasts. "Music" ignores them but Downcast displays them in an optional palette. I'd prefer to display the chapter stops in the main Detail view since it is possible to accidentally hide the palette, but just having the chapter stops is the main thing.

-- The short-lived "Ten Minute Test" podcast is a subjective auto review show with VB-H, a British presenter (5th Gear, not Top Gear). Her podcast is a narrated slide show that is in sync with the review. The video portion of it is completely essential to subjective reviewing. We need to see her, what she is doing, and what she sees. She normally does the review as she is behind the wheel, tooling around the test track. Downcast plays the slideshow podcast properly, but "Music" blows off the video portion entirely. Geez. How can Apple's official podcast player blow off video on the iPad? Unbelievable.

That was enough to close the deal. As you say, $2 is a steal for a great app. I'm not motivated to switch to anything else, but I expect that the existence of "Music" will motivate other developers to come up with other excellent alternatives.

Ok, so I'll be the heretic here... what's so wrong with the built in Podcast support in iTunes? I listen pretty much exclusively to podcasts as well, but a couple of the complaints in the article (and some of the comments) are, well, wrong.

You do not "have to manually check for new episodes and download them individually" -- iTunes defaults to checking for new episodes and downloading them every 24 hours, and you can modify it to do so more frequently (click on Podcasts in iTunes, then Settings... at the bottom -- can choose Hourly, Daily, Weekly, or Manually). You can even choose different settings for different podcasts (how often to check, how many to keep, etc).

I don't know why people are so peeved at "Music" either... other than the split between audio-only and video podcasts (which I dislike, but isn't a huge issue to me) I don't see any differences. You know you can move Podcasts from the "More" menu to one of the main selections on the bottom menu, right? Select Edit in the "More" screen and you can move it on there.

I guess if you don't sync with iTunes then this doesn't help you, and certainly the on device support is lacking, but even as much as I listen to podcasts I can't really see spending on an app that would address the only complaint I have w/ the default player -- that the only skip available is 30 seconds back. But I like the "play one after the other" behavior as well, shrug.

I'd be happy with something that simply sorts all my podcasts by date. Most of the podcasts I listen to do this just fine, but the ones I listen to that are hosted by Nerdist (Nerdist Podcast & The Indoor Kids, for example) always seem to default to an alphabetical sorting when I download them on my iPhone. I have to plug the phone into my computer, rename each episode, & sync them again. Anybody else having this problem?

Another-other vote for Downcast. I never even heard of it before their recent patch, just stumbled across it at Appshopper with their mention of 'iCloud' grabbing my eye. Besides the miracle of automagic syncing already mentioned, I'm also very happy with how well Downcast handles video casts. My prior player, Podcaster, was a bit pokey at playing videos and a total loss at streaming them. Downcast has been very reliable with streaming support, plus it can jog around in a streaming video* with nearly the grace of a regular pre-downloaded file.

(*Mostly tested with the Day[9] podcast. Servers for other shows may not support the appropriate offset GET magic, I imagine.)

I tried out Downcast based on all the recommendations in the comments. It's fully-featured and decently designed. However, I found it a bit sluggish to respond to input and the UI needs the attention of a talented designer.

Pocket Casts, on the other hand, is perfect for me. Beautiful and elegant UI. I love it. It's lacking a few features that Downcast has, but my god, it's lovely.

I don't know why people are so peeved at "Music" either... other than the split between audio-only and video podcasts (which I dislike, but isn't a huge issue to me) I don't see any differences. You know you can move Podcasts from the "More" menu to one of the main selections on the bottom menu, right? Select Edit in the "More" screen and you can move it on there.

Just to elaborate on this, your video podcasts are accessible in the Music app too. I just made a smart playlist that contains unplayed video podcasts and it syncs normally, shows up in the Music app, and works without fuss for sequential video playback.

While I would love to find a podcatcher that will finally untether me from iTunes, I often listen to my podcasts on my AppleTV, Mac, iPhone, or HP Touchpad (either in WebOS or Android, served to both via DLNA server that marks the episodes as played in iTunes as they're served). Because I often use different devices I can't abandon iTunes because that's the one piece of software that contains a master list of all my podcasts and their played/unplayed status. Is there an iOS podcatcher that can update the played status of a podcast in iTunes? I'm subscribed to ~40 podcast feeds and if I refuse to manage their played status across all of those devices manually or, shudder, drag and drop the unplayed episodes to the various devices.

As it is right now, I have all of my subs entered as favourites in Stitcher and if I listen to an episode there, I have to remember to mark it as 'listened' in iTunes to keep everything synced.

Author wrote that with the default Apple podcast (iTunes on Mac), "you have to manually check for new episodes and download them individually.". This is completely false, as you can subscribe to a number of new episodes, that will be downloaded each time they are available and iTunes is running. And then sync to your iDevice (tethered sync). I am happily listening to my favorite podcast in my car, automatically downloaded by iTunes the night before, since years. So sorry but as a"podcast addict" you lack all credibility!